The emerging trend of the single-subject news website is a media byproduct of our times—the response to a fundamental shift in content supply and demand. Traditional newsrooms, under competitive and commercial pressures, have been unable to maintain consistent coverage of complex stories. As a result, the supply of in-depth coverage or sustained reporting on certain issues has dropped. In parallel, the Internet has created a space for new communities of interest, surfacing a micro-audience around many of the same issues that have disappeared from the mainstream press. The result has been an opportunity for a change in format to a smaller-scale news delivery paradigm for topic-specific reporting delivered online to a dedicated digital audience. The shift toward what we’ve dubbed “hypertopical” news represents the activation of the “long tail” of journalism, or a shift away from the center of the bell curve in news coverage (the center being stories and issues that have maximum broad-based appeal). At the tails of that content bell curve lie stories and issues that appeal to a more limited audience. The tails are where one finds niche news markets with a latent demand for reporting topics that don’t make it onto the evening news.
The age of digital journalism has made it more economically feasible to serve those markets. It has eliminated the barriers to entry and lowered the cost of production for new publishers, while raising the prospects of discovery for a new audience. Today’s digital reporters can serve a loyal and geographically dispersed community of interest. The agent of change is the entrepreneurial journalist, the next generation publisher who becomes the de facto founder of a small media enterprise. In some cases the founding publisher is a career reporter; in other cases a subject-matter expert with profound knowledge of a particular domain. The element of focus—the fusing of deep domain knowledge with the elements of journalism—can have an enriching effect on the end product. For this study, conducted at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, we collected 20 such examples: practitioners of the single-subject news website in domains varying from foreign affairs (e.g., Tehran Bureau, North Korea News) to science (e.g, Deep-Sea News, HealthMap) to domestic and local policy issues (e.g., Education News Network/Chalkbeat, Gotham Gazette). Each is diverse in its structure and methodology, with operations ranging in size from one reporter to more than 50. Their founders likewise vary in age and experience, from veteran journalists to muckraking graduate students. Some are foundation-backed, others are self-funded, and almost all are exploring alternative revenue streams. Still, the sample collection presented a consistent set of results: The focus on a niche topic captures a smaller audience than mainstream news outlets (which cover a broad range of topics), but with a higher loyalty and intensity of engagement within that audience as measured by user return rates. Each case study also revealed overlapping challenges, from finding sustainable business models, to deploying technology and digital marketing, to managing staff turnover. These challenges represent the immensity of the task as journalists-turned-entrepreneurs come to fuse two distinct skill sets: the craft of professional news reporting and the practice of running an iterative startup culture.
Based on initial interviews with our 20 selected publishers, we compiled preliminary findings into this research paper; at the end of our study we intend to publish a more comprehensive report. In this Tow/Knight brief, we will outline the exigencies of the model and present the highlights of input from our research participants. Over time we will look to refine our suggested parameters for the model, compile and examine best practices, and suggest norms and guidelines for single-subject publishers that remain consistent with traditional journalistic values.